In general, a packet switch that is configured to receive a packet and forward the packet to a next hop needs to maintain state information in order for forward the packet. The state information is typically maintained in the form of a lookup table which may be used to determine the next hop to which the packet is routed. The maintenance and use of such lookup tables at the switches of a network is typically quite expensive, since the switches need to maintain respective lookup tables and a network control plane needs to install and maintain the lookup tables at the switches of the network. Additionally, the cost typically increases as the lookup tables become more granular in order to support more sophisticated per flow routing, traffic engineering, service chaining requirements, or the like. For example, classical packet switching (e.g., Ethernet, Internet Protocol (IP), and other classical packet switching techniques and protocols) typically relies on destination address based lookup tables, which can grow very quickly in large networks. This problem is considered to be most acute in Ethernet networks, since aggregation of Ethernet addresses is not possible. While IP networks support aggregation of addresses into prefixes, IP networks typically still have scalability issues with maintaining and updating large lookup tables. Also, while IP networks may support IP source routing, in which a packet that is to be routed to an intended destination includes the address of each device that the packet will traverse on its path to the intended destination, the use of such IP source routing still requires maintenance and use of lookup tables in the switches along the path to the intended destination. Furthermore, while Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) attempts to alleviate this lookup growth and complexity by replacing destination address based lookup with fixed label lookups which are simple to implement, MPLS also requires per MPLS flow state in each switch and, thus, also is unable to eliminate the label lookup from transit MPLS switches, nor the necessity for control state (e.g., in the form of LDP/RSVP-TE and so forth) in order to install the MPLS flow state information in the switches.